Saturday, May 31, 2014

We Interrupt Our Normal Programming...

Every available day to work on the garden has been usurped by non-garden activities, mostly unplanned. When those distractions abate, we have lovely ground-soaking rains, generally resulting in furious grass growth, taxing my ability to keep it semi-tamed in the lawn areas, but the pastures are doing the reversion to nature dance without even one brush hogging arranged (the folks with the big Kubota tractor were away earlier, so the fields have gone wild). I only got about half of one brush-pile burned, and burn season ends any day now. Dang.

I did manage to drag the branches from the fruit tree prunings to the back, and chipped them down with a rather puny shredder-chipper. The larger branches will get to season for next winter, if we can get a real wood-burning stove installed.

The garden beds slowly rise, but it takes hours of stacking on cardboard, then countless bags of grass clippings, dirt and letting the rains soak it.

I think y'all get the idea. There's a lot of worm activity down in the decomposing stuff, which surprising (to me) doesn't have that stinky odor that wet grass piles sometimes exude. I try to sprinkle some old organic fertilizer on a layer when I find some, and some old rose food I had dragged over from Maui got added, too.

We got some tomato, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, and Wall Walla onion plants to get the raggedy old greenhouse to working. There's almost no decent soil in the two rows, which look like straight potting soil was in there years ago. We've added some decent bagged soil, a bit of compost, and the little plants went to work. No pics, but after I find some sticks to set up some trellises, I'll take a couple. Seeds will be planted on the other row, now that the soil amending has settled. We leave the greenhouse door open during pollinator visiting hours, but tickling the tomato blossoms gets done often. We probably need more 99-cent lettuce packs to put in once we harvest some of that lovely green. It's not much, but compared to zero last year, we are happy.

Oh, and here's pair of feathered visitors in the south side of our back yard. I don't know what kind of birds they are, but the are big!

4 comments:

You know what they say Barry....you can never be thin enough, rich enough, or have a big enough shredder ; )A grass jungle has sprung up where our pasture used to be so I feel your pain. Need. Own. Tractor.Garden beds look they are coming along nicely!

Thanks for the vote for an iron pony - I want one of those little Kubota BX tractors, since they can be put on 0% interest payments for 5 years. Not easy to convince others, though. The garden beds are getting a bit tidier and taller this week, so I hope to post an update soon.

Nice to see a post here. those beds look promising. I hope you piled on lots of cardboard. My experience with my few lasagna beds has been that the bracken and quack grass grows right through the cardboard in no time at all.

Thanks, Ien. Yah, I stacked quite a lot of cardboard on the first couple of layers, probably twice as much or more than the grass and dirt. It killed the grass underneath, based on a couple of spots where I dug into it. The nightcrawler population is huge down there. I'll try to add more layers over the summer, once I get back to catch up.